TheMightyEthan

You have a good life ergo everyone in the United States has a good life and nothing at all needs to be changed. Right.

I like both. Why can't we have both? (In different games, I mean)

Yeah, the fact that they're fucking with search results is very not cool.

Based on in which Damian Lewis talks about doing an American accent he still sounds British to me, just it's less pronounced than when he's speaking naturally.

Don't get me wrong, I do like becoming an unstoppable algorithm of death, the problem is that it's really hard to balance systems like that and you end up with 2-3 "correct" builds, which gets boring (to me).

I am much in favor of choices between incomparables, rather than being able to calculate the optimal build.

Yet another reason to not buy Apple products.

Johnny, the reason it came up again now is because the game launched and people were having trouble playing it because the servers were down. It's not the only thing people are willing to talk about, it's just something that we've suddenly all been reminded of.

Suki: Wouldn't it be so romantic to make love under the moon and the stars? Sokka: Uh, not really, no.

Oh yeah, I don't think that's the main or only reason either, but I do think it was a significant reason. I think what they learned from Ubisoft is that you don't admit that that's why you're doing it. Hence all the protesting about coop and whatnot. EA's doing something similar with SimCity V.

And conversely, despite what they say I don't believe for one second that piracy was not a significant factor in this decision.

Just for the record (and I know you probably weren't directing that at me) I hated it when Ubi did it too, and refused to buy the games until they patched it out. Connect-at-launch is still stupid, but I can deal with it. Also I have nothing against Blizzard, in fact I'm generally very pro-Blizzard. I fucking love Starcraft 2 and quite enjoyed WoW back when I used to play it. It's mostly because of the real money auction house, actually. Diablo II is completely broken and unbalanced online because of cheating and item duping. With actual money in play, item duping would seriously fuck that up. It would seem like a no-brainer to have an option to create an entirely offline character, though. But I'm not sure if there's a shared stash that allows you to transfer items between your characters. If there is, then that's probably why it's not an option. If that's the case re: item tranferring just lock offline characters out of item transferring too. And RMAH is what I was getting at with the modding: you could cheat/mod/glitch weapons/items/etc and fuck up the economy. Yeah, that makes no fucking sense whatsoever. I'm not sure how you got that from what I said. All I was meant was that I'm not taking a "it's not a problem for me so I don't care" position. I genuinely don't feel like it's that big of a deal. Sure, if and when I'm prevented from playing because either my internet died or the servers are down, it's going to suck. But I'm not a fucking baby, I'll just go play something else in the meantime. Ah, I see now. I took it to mean "I have to deal with this anyway so you shouldn't care." Sorry.

Their explanation is that it's a multiplayer-focused game. The fact that they allow singleplayer belies that. They said that they want you to always be connected so they can prevent modded singleplayer characters from getting online and messing with the game. That is fine, but that is only a justification for not allowing offline characters to play online, not for disallowing offline altogether. Sure it's fine when it works. But what about when the servers go down, like today? Now you can't play your game at all, even singleplayer. It's not even as if it doesn't have a singleplayer mode, it does, you're just locked out of it for no good reason. The fact that your network adapter sucks is not a justification for forcing outages of a singleplayer game on other people.

The explanation was a cop-out. Sure the game is more designed for online coop, but they don't forbid singleplayer, they just require you to be online while playing singleplayer. If they'd really felt that the game could only properly be played with other people then they wouldn't have allowed singleplayer at all (like WoW), but they didn't do that, which means they acknowledged that singleplayer is a valid method of play, they just decided to cripple it.

How is that irrelevant? Personally I play CoD for singleplayer (though I don't pay anywhere close to full price for it), but I'll grant that most people buy it for the multiplayer. The difference is that the multiplayer in CoD by its very nature requires a network, so yeah if that networks down it may suck but it makes sense that you can't play. With Diablo 3, on the other hand, the network isn't required by the nature of singleplayer, it's required as a design decision by Blizzard, which makes it stupid.

Obstruction of justice is like destroying evidence, lying to police investigators, etc. Basically just fucking with the investigation.

Well whatever, we def have the most powerful military in the world. I don't even know why I'm arguing this, my original comment was entirely tongue-in-cheek...

Except when the Black Ops servers went down it didn't lock you out of singleplayer, did it?

So is that the equivalent of obstruction of justice over here?

Nah, we're extra efficient, which is why we don't need as many dudes. Besides, even by that measure we're still second in active military.

One of the largest? One of? How dare you, sir. I'll have you know that we spend 5 times as much as the next highest, being China, and that we alone account for 41% of global military spending. "One of" indeed.

Oh, I didn't mean world peace would ensue, I just meant that material wealth would be irrelevant because it would be infinite for everyone. People will always find something to fight about, I have no illusions about that.

My plan: invent replicators + infinite free energy (screw the laws of thermodynamics, what do they know?). Economy becomes obsolete, everyone's happy.

:laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: *Edit* - Makes me think of one of my favorite exchanges from TLA:

Yes, but he also clearly stated that was not the cause of this economic implosion: